Foster and Tennant continue their social critique of toxic sexuality and extend it to what they call the effeminate church in this next chapter. I actually do agree that some sectors of the church in America remain more feminine than masculine though I would probably disagree as to what that really means, what it looks like, and how to address the problem. The overly aggressive Young Turk syndrome of juvenile Reformed 20/30 somethings in our circles is in fact an effeminacy all its own perpetuated by missing fathers and their celebrity pastoral replacements, but you won’t see Foster/Tennant criticizing that! Foster/Tennant instead quote Podles and his book The Church Impotent (1999), a book I read and largely agreed with originally. After four graduate degrees and nearing the end of a PhD, the way I read now compared to the way I read twenty plus years ago has changed and so I’m finding myself less certain about some of the conclusions in his book and many others. Today I pay much more attention to definitions, presuppositions, implicit assumptions, philosophical considerations, and methodology on the part of authors. While I don’t plan to exhaustively read Podles again, he at least took the time to define terms like “masculine”. Foster/Tennant generally don’t.
The problem here isn’t just a matter of being imprecise. Foster/Tennant use a lot of terms in very special ways that they simply don’t define at all. Rather, the authors expect their readers to know what they’re talking about and and tend to beg the questions they address as a result. So, true to form, the chapter on “the effeminate church” provides an opportunity to talk more broadly about methodology in writing than I might otherwise because effeminacy itself is left to the wayside as yet another term that doesn’t get defined.
A work should be evaluated on its intended purpose and not as something it isn’t. It’s Good to Be a Man was not intended to be a scholarly volume and in fact its authors have very little in the way of academic qualifications. So, no evaluation should think that the work is some kind of scholarly or authoritative tome on the subject that just doesn’t pass muster. If we use moving as a way to say this, Foster and Tennant aren’t the sort of professional movers that come in with a massive truck, box everything up carefully for you, pack it properly, and safely deliver your furniture to the appropriate address. No, Foster and Tennant are more like ‘two guys and a truck’ and their work should be seen as such. Mirrors are going to be broken, wine glasses shattered because heavier boxes were thrown on glassware, and some stuff has to be left behind because they didn’t bring a big enough truck. But, they’ll get the job done! After all, this is just a popular book so they’ve not promised the world. They’re setting this ‘two guys and a truck’ expectation in order to avoid questions about whether they can actually pull off the move in question. And, this is natural given the background of the authors. Foster has a Bachelor’s in Divinity from Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and an unfinished degree in History from Northern Kentucky University. Bnonn Tennant has no formal academic training at all. Foster has 24 years of what we might call varied ministerial experience both inside and outside Reformed denominations while Tennant has little to no experience in pastoral ministry. Foster pastors a CREC church in Ohio currently but Tennant’s church background is a bit more suspect. Tennant was excommunicated from a Reformed Baptist church over issues of justification and is apparently part of some kind of Reformed church plant at present. Foster has experience counseling as a result of his ministerial work but nothing is on record for Tennant. But, why go here to address the background and education of the authors when this is a popular level work?
The reason for doing so is bound up in the interdisciplinary nature of the work as presented and the problems of method in making the claims they offer. Foster/Tennant don’t just make theological or pastoral claims sufficient for a popular guidebook in understanding how to be a Christian man. They also address or make sociological, psychological, anthropological, cultural and even technological claims among other things. Yet, they do so in a fashion that makes clear that they’re not as familiar with many of the subjects they address or the existing debates more broadly as they let on in putting forward their point of view. To date, I’ve provided a substantial review in detail of various problems with what they’ve presented and will continue to do so into the remaining chapters. So, this is no mere swing at them in order to enforce some kind of credentialism. The problem is that their background demonstrates a general unfamiliarity with the way conclusions are reached and arguments are made more broadly. Foster/Tennant work with a methodology in the book overall that doesn’t speak capably to what they address and how they should address it even at a popular level. Besides, works that purport to be Reformed in doctrine and practice should be better argued and more capably presented for us to consider. Authors that write should be better trained and more fluent with the subjects they’re considering than what’s demonstrated here in It’s Good to Be a Man.
The shotgun approach of the authors force them to make claims they don’t defend while only asserting particular positions on a wide variety of subjects. This can be an effective strategy in dealing with people at the popular level that don’t know any better but it amounts to a manipulative form of argumentation. In reality, the methodology presented here is really just postmodern because it attempts to use the power of words to persuade and critique on an unsuspecting and typically uninformed public without the requisite argumentation that would make a real case. People who are fluent in the various disciplines at a scholarly level typically see through the assertion of mere claims and begging the question that Foster/Tennant engage in over and over both because they have a demonstrated mastery over the subject matter in question and they know an empty claim when they see it.
For example, Foster/Tennant make much of white knighting in talking about the effeminate church but somehow fail to mention that such a syndrome is seen as something both men and women do (Lamla and Krieger, 2015). So, thinking white knighting is a feminine or effeminate trait that men exhibit in church is entirely suspect if we go with the actual consideration of psychology as a discipline. More likely, the authors have developed their point of view from the sort of urban legend definition of white knighting at the popular level on the Internet, where some men defend women in online conversations. Regardless, the authors don’t demonstrate that white knighting exists in the church as a denial of masculinity and only assert it as such. It might be true, for example, that some ministers are “dependent upon female approval for their sense of self-worth” but no evidence is given for such a claim beyond the bare assertion. All we really get is a quote from Spurgeon about foppy ministers that establishes nothing except Spurgeon had an opinion about certain ministers he encountered. But, what does that have to do with the church in the twenty-first century?
Often, Foster/Tennant resort to secular authors if they want to support a particular point but they do so only to put a few bricks at the bottom of a house of cards they then build as if that creates a solid foundation for what they’re claiming. For example, it’s not immediately clear that someone like “secular psychologist Robert Glover” would agree that so-called “white knights” are the very “nice guys” he addresses in his own work, that it remains a phenomenon only men engage in, or even the notion of patriarchy itself as what ought to be the norm. In fact, Glover considers patriarchy as damaging to men and not just women so it’s not even clear that what Glover identifies as “nice” among men is the same as what Foster/Tennant are keying off of here in this chapter. Glover doesn’t mention white knights in the book they reference and yet an equivocation is immediately offered by Foster/Tennant to consider them as the same by building off Glover’s description of the nice guy and applying it to so-called white knights in the church. Now, maybe Glover makes things clear elsewhere that white knights and nice guys are the same but we’re only provided with the one reference they do offer in citing him where he doesn’t address it at all.
Foster/Tennant then take something like their bare claim regarding white knights and move into further assertions without evidence. Women in churches, according to the authors, “strive to include anyone agreeable, regardless of error” and “strive to exclude anyone disagreeable, regardless of orthodoxy”. No evidence or argumentation is given to support this claim. Things like this ring a bit as if Foster/Tennant are speaking to their own experiences more than anything since no real evidence is offered. The problem with experience as a guide (yet another postmodern problem) is that others have different experiences. I’ve met a lot of women in churches that are entirely disagreeable and in fact foster it (no pun intended). The only way to move past what experience teaches is to engage in sociological and cultural analysis that is likely both quantitative and qualitative but Foster/Tennant don’t seem to know about more formal research considerations like this or even consider it relevant. Further, the authors also haven’t considered that cultural considerations weigh in here as well. Women and men do not behave or think the same in various cultures whether that’s the broadly reserved and Swiss-German culture of rural Pennsylvania, the refined culture of Southern gentility, or the more casual culture of the American Southwest. Foster/Tennant then go on to talk about women in a misogynist way similar to the way racists talk about a minority they don’t like, “Women will always be tempted to remove discomfort. This happens even with the best women, out of a well-intentioned concern for the emotional well-being of others”. Is evidence offered here for this claim? No, the authors just continue to build the house of cards and offer stereotypical nonsense. Further, like the previous example, we can point to other experiential claims that blow away the stereotype presented by Foster/Tennant. Next they claim, “A church in which the influence of women is not checked by masculine rule–where, indeed, it is instead elevated and amplified–will always descend into mystical emotional chaos.” This wide-ranging claim is also suspect in the extreme when we consider entire branches of Christianity that are exclusively male-led, such as the Eastern Orthodox, and delve regularly into mystical apophatic expressions of Christian teaching and practice that have existed for more than a thousand years. What makes “mystical emotional chaos” the province of feminine expressions of Christianity except the naked claim Foster/Tennant offer without evidence?
When Foster/Tennant do get around to talking about men and their plight in today’s church they offer false dichotomies. Either men must “check in their testicles” or they are “escorted to the door” by those white knighting for the women in the church. Either they “lay aside their masculinity” or they “lay aside their Christianity”. Again, this back and forth between two extremes is really just a false dichotomy and a reductive consideration that forces a postmodern dialectic that’s not actually in play. More likely, men exhibit a range of behaviors on several fronts that we may or may not consider effeminate in our churches. Adding the outstanding scholarship of Peter Jones as cited as a plank to support the notion that the American church is fostering androgyny as a return to a more pagan norm is just groundless because Jones isn’t even addressing what’s going on in today’s churches in the article in question that they cite. The research Jones puts forward that Foster/Tennant cite is on the pagan past and not a postmodern present. Jones is doing religious history while Foster/Tennant are attempting to do sociology. While Jones in other work no doubt goes where Foster/Tennant would like, what’s provided in citation does not in fact treat what they lay claim to in any detail.
Graduate study in methodology is relevant here, what Foster and Tennant don’t have or seem to be familiar with, because it helps us see where assumptions and presuppositions are operative, even ones the authors might not be aware of–what we might call blind spots. Further, more study in how we get to a particular conclusion helps weed out bad methodologies where claims are made but no real evidence is offered for them. The problem is that the two options for men in today’s churches as described by Foster/Tennant aren’t the only ones and in fact preclude the actual solution to any sort of problems in this vein. The New Testament tells us to stand firm and fight where we are rather than move on to what we might consider more fruitful ground (Eph. 6:10-17; 1 Cor. 16:13). No doubt Foster/Tennant want to advocate men to be men and stand firm, but what they’re saying here is that it’s impossible in today’s churches mainly because of women. But, that’s just not true nor is it helpful to say so by disparaging women in the process.
In short, Foster/Tennant display methodological problems in this chapter and elsewhere throughout the book. The authors do not define their terms, their scope is too broad, as a result they make wide-ranging claims without support, they implicitly support a postmodern approach, they are seemingly unaware of the underlying assumptions they bring to their treatment of the subjects in question, and they offer extended commentary on subjects that they don’t demonstrate any mastery over.
Next Review:
The Anti-Technological Stance of It’s Good to Be a Man
The Effeminate Church
No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 1
No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 2
No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 1
No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 2
How Porn & Video Games Hijack Manhood
Two for One Day – How to Bear the Weight/Manhood Through Mission